Nyarlathotep
by Axolotlmann
Summary: "The stars, Haruhi Suzumiya. They are in the way." Sometimes the answer to our questions is to terrible to speak out loud.


Nyarlathotep

Haruhi Suzumiya was known by many titles: Brigade Chief, hunter of mysteries, a city known curiosity or simply "that strange bitch". Haruhi, with her brown hair at shoulder length and her typical yellow ribbon was known for being a strange girl.

She was a seeker of the unknown, a hunter of mysteries ans seemed to see the real world as boring, maybe even as beneath her notice.

This attitude and her treatment of other people lead to a general loneliness in her life, even though she was a very attractive young girl.

She was loud, commandeering, slightly cruel and known for forcing her crazy plans and dangerous activities on other people. She had no concept of personal space or shame. A very unfortunate combination, which lead to the whole school wondering just how the four people in her Brigade could bear her demeanour.

Yet it was exactly this girl, who was unusually quiet on this warm evening in late spring. People with a flair for mysteries often possessed a quiet and thoughtful side, which in Haruhis case came out when she was all alone, without her lackeys or the judging eyes of people.

At times like this it was this girl, who revelled in Chaos, who treated human beings like toys and didn't have a sense of shame or morality, who sat on a bench and watched the stars.

That in itself was not unusual. Many people, present and past were fascinated by the shining lights in the eternal darkness between worlds.

Haruhi saw the stars different. They were annoyances, things that obstructed the view towards the things behind the darkness, the whispering secrets between the dark holes of the center and the edges of reality, with their obnoxious light.

Haruhi snorted and glared at the stars, for daring to defy her. But as she looked away from the sky, she noticed that she was no longer alone.

There on the big Oak Tree next to the bench leaned a man, who looked like he didn't belong. He was very tall and towered over Haruhi like a monument. His skin was black, not dark but a lightless black like ebony ans seemed completely hairless, so that the starlight was mirrored on the dark surface, more like the sea in the darkest of nights, than human skin.

His hair was as black as his skin and flowed down his back in luscious locks. His eyes had two different colours, one was blue, like the deepest sea and one was a fiery orange, like a dying sun. Both awoke primal feelings of fear in every human who was unfortunate enough to look into them, both as terrifying and fascinating as deep holes in the fabric of reality.

But Haruhi didn't fear them. She looked at those eyes, like other people looked at the stars, full of longing and of wonder. She just knew that this man had the answers, she had searched for her whole life and maybe even more.

Haruhi stared literally into the abyss. And Nietzsche was right. The abyss stared back. And he was smiling.

"They are in the way, aren't they?", he asked.

For a moment Haruhi couldn't register the words, to fixated she was with the voice. The voice was like the eyes, with a depth composed of all emotions at the same time and joy, sadness, fear and anger vibrated together in a deep baritone that sent shivers down Haruhis back.

A few seconds passed before Haruhi realized that he asked her a question.

"Uhh what?", she gave her admittedly not very sophisticated answer.

The man pointed to the sky. "The stars. They hide what lies beyond from our sight."

Then he stopped as if he had a random thought.

"Ahh. But didn't you ever think that there is a good reason for that? That the things beyond are not free for human eyes to see?" He grinned a toothy grin. "That they are there to protect you?"

And for the first time in her life Haruhi Suzumiya was speechless.

"Who are you?", she whispered.

„Who am I?" he laughed. „That is another one of these questions. Who are you, Haruhi Suzumiya? She who seeks and fails to find what lies directly before her eyes. She who seeks but never finds..."

He laughed. „A fun title, don't you think? A bit more modern than the dramatic and spooky ones the others like so much. Not bad for the beginning."

It was this moment where Haruhi realized, that her lifelong search had come to an end. For some reason she felt no fear, just curiosity, excitement and something like a strange familiarity.

„But I did find something", she answered the stranger. „And I really want to know what it was that I found on my search, she spoke with a lot more confidence than she was really feeling.

„Did you?", he answered. „But wasn't it me that found you? You could say our positions are the same if we think about our searches. I am too a seeker. Both did we find something but what was it that we searched for.

Haruhi shrugged, captivated by the conversation. She almost forgot that she spoke to a stranger who was almost certainly not human and possibly dangerous.

"I think that is determined by what you searched for in the first place."

"Right you are. But he question remains if you find what you searched for or if you find something else that fulfils your dreams."

„That depends on what you find", Haruhi answered musing.

She was starting to have fun. It was this kind of conversation why she founded the brigade but her members weren't really enthusiastic about that. Be it the struggling mascot, the boring vice-president or the silent bookworm, nobody had any kind of enthusiasm for the supernatural.

Not to mention Kyon.

The dark man seemed to enjoy the conversation as much as Haruhi and Haruhi choose to ignore the fact that he seemed to read her thoughts and knew far too much. It was better not to think about that.

"That is true", the man said. "And I think both of us did find something today, isn't that right, Haruhi Suzumiya?"

She nodded slowly. I am not sure what you found, but I did find something."

´"And what was it you searched for?"

She looked up at the stars, this time towards the light. "Hope", she whispered. "Hope that my search wasn't for nothing." She turned around and looked into the eyes of the man, this time without flinching."But I'd still like to know what else I found."

The man smiled, almost unnaturally so and his eyes were flickering in the faint starlight. He did not answer her question though.

"Hope, Haruhi Suzumiya is a most dangerous thing. It makes man do foolish things.

I for my part certainly know what I found today, Haruhi Suzumiya. You are a chaotic person, aren't you? Order and the ordinary disgust you and you want to see behind the stars."

Haruhi shrugged. „True. Ordinary people are bhoring. They are to content with their lot in life, never wondering what lies beyond."

The man was standing now right in front of her, towering over her like a dark obelis from ancient times. „They not only bore you", he hissed in a low voice. "They make you angry. They disgust you. Rising themselves like pigs for the slaughter, never questioning, never changing. Abominations against this ever changing universe."

Haruhi stepped back. "What do you mean?", she asked, a little bit of fear creeping back into her bones.

He sighed deeply and his grin vanished. Instead his face was filled with a seriousness that seemed infinitely more dangerous than his threatening laugh.

"Chaos my dear. True and unbound chaos."

He laughed again and began walking in small circles, chuckling alll the way and stretching his left arm towards the stars. "Spirals in circles, in spirals that are circling around even more circling spirals. The enemy of logic with elements so insane, so devoid of reality that a human mind cannot even comprehend it without touching the deepest parts of its inherent madness."

The face of the man seemed like it was made of a swirling liquid, flowing together and falling apart into vaguely human and inhuman shapes, some of them constructs so abstract, that they summoned visions of unfathomable terror into Haruhis mind.

With a gasp she fell backward and caught herself on the bench.

The moment passed and the face was back, still with a cold smile on it and these terryfing eyes, staring unblinking into her very soul.

"Ordinary perople are so very boring, aren't they? That's why people like the two of us are needed. To bring a little bit of chaos into their boring, ordinary lives. To make them understand the real wonders and horrors of the universe."

Many different of emotions passed through Haruhi, whose Mixture together created something new, something that was as exciting as it was terrifying. Gnawing, cold fear her primordial instincts, mixed with pure amazement and a strange familiarity that Haruhi couldn't quite place.

She swallowed heavily but forced herself to answer through the storm of emotions.

"But what do you want with me?", she asked.

The man threw his head back and laughed, a shrill, hollow laugh that resounded from the trees around then and cut through the darkness like a knife. It seemed to be underlined with the songs of sirens and the cries of the suffering, with a million other noises that man would never be able to identify as such.

It was a laugh that send cold tremors down Haruhis back.

"A single ordinary human is boring, but put together humanitys potential for chaos is astonishing. And know think of all this potential held together in a single vessel, an Avatar for humaitys worst and best qualities."

A strange ripple seemed to stretch his body and a slow, cold wind began to blow.

"But what.. me?", Haruhi did not understand or rather failed to comprehend what this creature was trying to tell her. Did it mean her? Had she searched for her whole life, only to have failed to find what she was searching for under her very nose?

"Time means nothing to the cosmos itself", he told with a low voice. "And the human understanding of time even less. But even in our own, greater comprehension of time it happens very seldom, that a star seed matures enough to grapple a concept and we can accept someone new in our little, dysfunctional family.

Haruhi did not understand and remained speechless, a wonder in itself as Kyon would say but there were greater forces at work here than the acts of merely a human god.

„But to unterstand you must see. Your eyes have yet to open"; he stopped and seemed to think about something, then he asked her directly with a sharp tone: "Do you think, that there is such a thing as a spherical square?"

"Of yourse not", Haruhi answered, still scared but possessed by a strange calm born of fascination. It seemed as if her restlessnes was gone, as if the things she searched fpr were finally within reach.

„In an ordinary world you would be right", the man agreed. "But you and I don't give much about an ordinary world, don't we? Finde me a spherical square and we willl talk again, Haruhi Suzumiya."

The man turned around and took a few steps into the darkness, where his form seemed to flimmer and disappear.

"Wait!", called Haruhi. "Who are you?"

The man seemed to wait for a second, but he was melting into the darkness of the night. Haruhi tried to follow him, but there was no sign of him to find. The only thing remaining was a desecrated whisper in terrible, ancient tongues like a bad taste in her mouth. A whisper that seemed to repeat the same strange word over and over It seemed like a name but Haruhi couldn't quite hear it. Her ears heard it, but her mind still failed to comprehend the word but she knew the answer was out there, almost in reach.

 _Nyarlathotep._

"Chaos, hmm?", she muttered, knowing her search was almost at it's end.

* * *

Yuki Nagato was a slender, very petite girl, with porcelain skin and soft, grey hair. She was no head turning beauty, not like Mikuru, who was only described by most of the males in her school as "bombshell" or Haruhi, who had a kind of aggressive attractiveness about her, that wasn't even offset by her personality.

There was a certain cuteness to her small frame and big eyes, but as it was it was not only her appearance that matched a porcelain doll, her personality too.

Not that she needed something like attractiveness and her emotionless facade was not an act.

She was not human after all.

She was a program, downloaded into a platform of synthetic flesh and circuits, giving the vague illusion if appearing and acting as a human would. The enormous databanks of the _Integrated Data Entity_ created her to observe an anomaly that could pose a threat to their servers, like the Mi-Go or the elder things.

Haruhi Suzumiya could be a far greater threat than the dangerous aliens, maybe even more dangerous than the agents of the great race of Yith, the Entity occasionally defended itself from.

Her powers were as resistant to her efforts to understand their nature as they were powerful. Not only that but the Entity, who was able to change the underlining numbers of reality to suit their needs, was not able to gain any influence over concepts that applied directly to Haruhi Suzumiya or her powers.

All that led to the calculating of terrible alternating scenarios, that were growing more possible each second Haruhi was left unchecked. In this moment the program designated Yuki Nagato felt, if that was the right word for what she did, a change in the code of reality, which led to the sending of several alarm codes towards the Entity's servers, most of them in colours the human eye was unable to see.

If Yuki Nagato had been able to feel emotions, she would have been in panic so terrible a human mind would have broken. Even so a shudder rushed through her body of comprimated data, when several runtimes were destroyed by the mere spelling of HIS name in binary code.

Yuki Nagato needed to shut down for a second and restart her primary runtimes.

This one second wouldn't have been noticed by an ordinary human.

Itsuki Koizumi might have been human but he was far from ordinary.

His brain worked on a very different level to a normal human, a fact that gave him supernatural powers. If you would call it a burden or a privilege the Entity had worked together with his people and Mikurus agency in the past to ward of threats against the earths, be they Yith-scientists, elder things or star seeds, with differing results.

"Nagato-san?", he asked worried. "Is something wrong?"

Yuki opened her eyes, repairing the lasts of her codes and purging her systems.

Her voice was as emotionless as ever, but weak, not yet fully embedded in this reality.

"Exactly three minutes and thirty-two seconds ago an outer god made contact with Haruhi Suzumiya. The entity is trying to reach a consensus about what is to do now."

Koizumi, who wasn't protected by Yukis emotionlessness almost choked on his cup of tea and coughed wildly.- It took a few minutes for him to calm down in which Yukis agitated state was shown only by the increased frequency of her blinking.

When Kóizumi calmed down the expression on his face was one of horror, an emotion that didn't normally appear on the collected espers face.

"What happened?", he asked, his voice fearful and weak.

"Nothing yet", answered Yuki. "The crawling chaos seems to have blocked my sensors and conversed for a few minutes with Haruhi Suzumiya. I identified it's energy when it left."

"Does she..know?

"It gave her it''s name. That's why I needed to reboot."

Koizumi inhaled sharply. "Why did it have to be HIM. If the king in yellow or the black goat had found her she would be dead or enslaved. The crawling chaos is far too dangerous and as unpredictable as it's master." He shuddered. "Who knows what it wants with Haruhi."

Yuki nodded. "Whith the outer god in the picture, the possibility of using Kyon to manipulate Haruhi into finding the key to a higher existence for humanity has shrunk by ninety percent."

She waited a short moment. "The possibility of her being a threat to humanity and the Entity have multiplied by thirty-seven."

Her brown eyes bore into Koizumis and somehow she managed to make her emotio9nless stare look intimidating. "Without more information there cannot be a consensus about the necessity of Haruhi Suzumiyas elimination."

Koizumi looked away.

"I doubt we would be able to."

Yuki didn't answer.

* * *

In was still the same night and Haruhi had not gone to sleep yet. She wasn't tired. Instead she was staring at a square, she had drawn on a slip of paper. Haruhis interest in mathematics went only so far, as it was the foundation of servery science known to humanity and as such important to her search, which meant that mundane, boring mathematics did not in fact hold her interest very well.

Still she had written down every formula that could be allied to a square, rectangle or sphere.

The words of the strange man wouldn't let her rest.

It was frustrating. A spherical square? What had a square in common with a sphere. Nothing. Absolutely nothing that was the problem. The first problem was already without solution. A sphere was a three-dimensional body, a square two-dimensional on a flat surface and as such they were even less compatible than a sphere and a cube would be. No formula or mind game could change this fundamental fact, this difference in their very concept of existence itself.

A square could not be spherical and stay a square.

It was impossible.

With a frustrated cry she hurled her pencil into a corner. Surely the strange man did not mean his words literally? There couldn't be a spherical square. It had to be a metaphor for something, but Haruhi couldn't figure out for what. She looked up all kinds of meanings and metaphors for cubes, spheres, squares and circles and had constructed theory after theory, one stranger than the other.

Frustrated she threw herself on her bed.

"What an unlogical question", she sighed.

And just as she had spoken the words, she jumped up so hastily, she stubbed her toe on the way to her desk, not even noticing the pain. What exactly did the man say?`Chaos, the enemy of order and the ordinary. There simply was no way a square could be spherical. That was not logical, not understandable, impossible in the real, ordinary world.

Haruhi was in a Trance as she took her pencil and drew a triangle next to her square.

 _Not logical._

Over that she drew a parallelogram .

 _Chaos._

And over that a in itself swirling spiral. She did not allow her mind to carry out the task, instead she closed her eyes and heard the whispers, that seemed to come from all directions.

 _The one true answer._

And when she opened her eyes she let out a short, breathless laugh. The triangle had four blunt angles. She blinked and looked again. It was for certain a triangle. She measured the angles. She measured four times and the sum of angles resulted in 254 degrees.

And it was till a triangle, a triangle with four angles and a sum of angles that was far too high.

She laughed out loud when she looked at her parallelogram. It was without a doubt a parallelogram. It just wasn't parallel.

In hindsight the answer had been so simple.

Impossible angles, forms but not forms, bodies and still not bodies. There were no constants in chaos, not even variables.

All was Chaos and Chaos was nothing but madness.

That was the answer.

The whole answer of everything that was and everything that wasn't.

That was the reason why ordinary things were boring and at the same time the solution to the problem. Chaos and madness could make the ordinary extraordinary. Especially humans. Only Chaos helped great minds be creative, everything was created from chaos and everything returned top Chaos.

Every moving system moves towards a chaotic order.

Order and harmony mean stagnation, a delusion of the mindless and those without real greatness to their minds, which could only be found within Chaos.

The corners of Haruhis room were swimming in her sight. Darkness seemed to creep out of all the angles, tasking the form of terrible , twisted hounds, howling for blood. Strange, mad tunes played, so otherworldly, that she could not describe them.

Haruhi smiled as she knew what she saw.

She looked into the darkness and a single eye, glowing like molten rock, played with by whisking shadows and rotten flesh, looked back at her.

It was terrifying. More terrifying than a human mind could endure. But Haruhi showed no fear, looking directly into the eye of Chaos.

She laughed.  
"What wonderful things you show, Nyarlathotep."

The mass shifted and grew, the shadows became deeper as the name was spoken. The moon took on a green colour and a few stray cats died in pain, when they heard the terrible name from out of the window, like an unholy whisper of plague and knowledge.

The outer god raised his hands, that were not hands and touched Haruhi, who did not shrink back when the tentacles of midnight caressed her face.

"I can show you so much more, young sister", he said. "That means, if you are ready to see?"

Haruhi took the tentacle and stroked it carefully with her thumb, like one would the hand of an old relative, full of wisdom and advice.

"I am always searching. To seek without noticing, to find and search some more, that is my nature. Show me more!"

Darkness rose and Haruhi followed through this revolting graveyard of the universe, the muffled, maddening beating of drums, and thin, monotonous whine of blasphemous flutes from inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond Time; the detestable pounding and piping whereunto dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic, tenebrous ultimate gods—the blind, voiceless, mindless gargoyles whose soul is Nyarlathotep.

And she smiles with her hand in her brothers. She knew who she was.


End file.
